Back in 2004, with the documentary Heir to an Execution, Ivy Meeropol began the decades-spanning project of exorcising the demon haunting her family. The Academy-shortlisted film sheds some light on the dark heritage of the Meeropol kids, descended as they are from Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the couple executed by the United States government in 1953 having been convicted of sharing military secrets with the Soviet Union. When not teaching as an economics professor, Ivy’s father Michael spent most of his adult life on a crusade to restore and advocate for the reputation of his late parents, after years of defamation from the sinister prosecutor in the case Roy Cohn. Ivy’s film-making brought some elusive semblance of closure to this process – until, that is, early November 2016.
“At first, I really didn’t want to make a film about Roy Cohn, because I felt like I’d delved into my family’s story enough, and I didn’t really relish returning to that topic,” Meeropol tells the Guardian over the phone from her home quarantine.
“That made me resistant to tackling his story, even though I was fascinated and compelled by him and I certainly had this unique perspective. But once I did decide to embark on this project, which was a result of Trump’s election – that’s what made me decide to do this – then I did start to feel like this might be an extension of my earlier work.”
Meeropol’s latest feature, HBO’s boldly titled Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, returns her to the grimmest chapter of her personal history. But she revisits the topic with fresh perspective to illuminate the other side of her life’s defining conflict, with focus placed less on her family’s struggle than on Cohn himself, a significant yet little-seen character in the previous film. It plays like a timely companion piece to Meeropol’s early work, enriching and recontextualizing her ideas instead of simply restating them. “I made it clear I didn’t want this to be Heir to an Execution Part II,” she says. “I wanted it to be something new.”
She began by decentering herself, the implicit protagonist of Heir to an Execution. She knew she’d have to provide what she refers to as a “synopsis” of how she and her relatives fit into the material, but she wanted that to serve as the gate through which she could venture into new territory. “What was gratifying was how I was able to build on Heir to an Execution, expanding on the period of time when my father and uncle were trying to reopen the case. All that new material, which tied back to Cohn, was a revelation.”
The film functions in part as critical biography, comparing conflicting sides of a personality more complicated than evil. While she refrained from playing armchair psychologist and digging into his childhood, Meeropol examined Cohn as an avowed social conservative who lived an open-secret second life as a gay bon vivant. (John Waters provides color commentary on Cohn’s years in the queer hotspot Provincetown. A rare interview, he only agreed to sit down after Meeropol explained her stake in Cohn’s world. She laughs when she recalls him conceding: “For you? I’ll do it!”)
He shared a house with Norman Mailer and counted Andy Warhol as a friend, yet demonized “deviants” of all stripes in public statements clashing harshly with the company he kept. Recreational assholery seemed to be his greatest hobby, as the millions in deliberately unpaid bills from hotels and dry cleaners still attest, but Meeropol looked for a more circumspect view all the same.
“If I was going to make this one-note, there’s nowhere to go with that,” Meeropol explains. “He is a complex person. I had to decide to have a little empathy for him. I thought of him as a young man in Washington for the first time, first job with McCarthy, and that that was probably one of the unfriendliest spaces at the time for a gay person. He had to be so careful, but then at the same time, he was laughing and traipsing around with G David Schine.”
The relevance of Cohn and his legacy of dishonest, dirty tricks has been renewed by the ascendancy of Donald Trump, the lawyer’s longtime client and protege. His wobbly-fisted rule has inspired a recent wave of Cohn-related art, including a remounting of the Pulitzer-winning play Angels in America with Nathan Lane as the larger-than-life Cohn and last year’s documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? Meeropol thinks of that superficially similar production as complement rather than competition, by the way; once she saw how director Matt Tyrnauer’s approach differed from her own, as she says, “I wasn’t worried so much.” He inspected a linear history, while she intends her film as something closer to a timely warning of the psychology Cohn and Trump share. Though at times, she still questions its efficacy. The people who stand to learn the most from her efforts seem the least likely to give them a chance.
“I was thinking about how to get this movie in front of Trump supporters in specific,” she says. “That motivated me in the beginning, the thought that people who support him need to know where he learned his moves, where he got his mob connections … It’s frustrating, though, because I know that I don’t know how to break through to that world. The title alone will probably rule out some people. I hope they’ll be intrigued by the complexity of those three words, not just bully and coward, but victim. But anyone who’s interested in how we got here, whether you’re pro-Trump or not, can get a lot from this movie.”
Whether they like it or not, the film will infiltrate Trump voters’ living rooms when it goes to air on HBO this Thursday. When it does, Meeropol will be ready to close the book on a subject that’s always blurred the lines between the personal and professional. “I’m definitely ready to move on,” she says. “After Heir to an Execution, I thought I’d said what I needed to say and gone through what I needed to go through with regard to my family history. Now I really have, in a different way. I hope that I don’t need to again. Unfortunately, we have to keep talking about my grandparents. I just don’t know if I’ll be the one doing it from now on. I think I’ve said enough on the subject.”
But this conversation never really ends, so long as her family line continues onward. Every new generation of parents will have to make sense of the scar left by Cohn for their children, approximating the difficult process that Ivy Meeropol has completed on a national scale. Though she’s done the more intimate version too; when her son, now 15, turned eight, she did the thing she’s spent most of her adult life doing, and explained the bad thing that happened when Grandpa was little.
“I delayed telling him about this,” she says. “He’s very close with my father, but I just thought about the myriad things that could upset him as a child, so I kind of shielded him. But with my kids, I eventually told them that their great-grandparents believed in changing the world, and that Julius was involved in secret-sharing with the Soviet Union specifically because of what he believed in, which was equality and justice. He had to know, eventually, and I wanted him to hear it from me.”
Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn will air on HBO on 18 June and in the UK at a later date
